Interview: DMA’s – “We’re In This Game For The Long Haul”

To the outsider looking in, DMA’s have had something of a hectic couple of months. First, they signed to Melbourne taste-makers I OH YOU without unveiling a single track or playing any live dates, before unleashing their first single and their debut self-titled EP, along with a string of tour dates, last month. But to hear it from members Johnny Took and Matt Mason, it’s not been as crazy it may seem.

“Nah, it was cool, it was chill,” Johnny, whom some readers may recognise as one of the many faces in punk-string seven-piece Little Bastard, recently told Music Feeds. “It’s been a bit of a process with this band. We’ve strongly focused on songwriting and the response has been nice, but we try not to get too excited. We wanna be in this game for the long haul.”

While many were surprised that the band were signed to a label before having even played their first gig, the band didn’t see it as such a big deal, having played extensively with other projects. “We’d all been in bands for years. So when we played the other week it didn’t feel like our first show because we’d been doing it for so long,” explained Matt. “We played some places where we got four gigs a week, in other bands,” added Johnny.

Speaking about the process behind the band’s debut EP, Johnny said, “We had to make a conscious effort to make it pretty cohesive, because we’ve got lots of tunes. So when looking at them after two years of songwriting, you don’t want to freak people out too much with all the stuff, but you also wanna let people know that it’s the same band.” Johnny added that the band’s first single, Delete, was written by Mason “when he was 19, which was like five years ago.”